Plan de l’article

Salons. Un éclairage sur la société par les revues savantes.

Boîte à outils

Boîte à outils

Corps de l’article

I opened this book equal with parts trepidation and enthusiasm. Trepidation stemmed
from concern that we may not need another cookbook focused on a single ingredient. Was
this going to be a gimmicky exercise in overreaching brought on by a current trend in
publishing? Enthusiasm stemmed from my love of salt and the pre-existing respect I had for
its power. Experiences — and experiments — in the
kitchen had taught me that sound cooking techniques are, so often, linked to salt. What
could be better than a book dedicated to “salting wisely and well, with recipes”?

The book opens with the following quote from the great chef Thomas Keller (of French
Laundry fame): “The ability to salt food is the single most important skill in cooking.”
With that as a reverent jumping off point, the authors, Fritz Gubler and David Glynn (with
the assistance of Nutritional Science academic, Dr. Russell Keast), assert that to
“deprive ourselves of the magic that salt brings to food would be something close to
madness” (9) and then proceed to give us a love letter to salt via the information,
cooking techniques, and recipes that this well-researched, intelligently conceptualized
book contains.

The book is divided into four sections — Salt
Wise, The Salt Kitchen, The Story of Salt, and Resources — that form the building blocks of the salt literacy for which the
authors advocate. They want us to use salt enthusiastically, but with a deep understanding
and respect for the ingredient and its proper use. “Many of the health issues faced by the
Western world," they argue, "are attributable to the things we eat, and if we make our own
food, we can more easily control what goes into our bodies.” (38) Readers are urged to
beware processed food, since that is where salt lurks, often virtually invisible and in
surprising places, in unhealthy quantities. You only need to examine the sodium content of
a can or Tetra pack of commercial soup to confirm this.

One goal of this book is to rid the world of salt shakers and eliminate the distance
they create between ingredient and user. The Salt
Wise section is dedicated to acquainting the reader with what it means to salt
wisely and this is done primarily through educating the palate and the fingertips to be
able to distinguish between different salts. How does the texture, colour, size of grain,
weight, moisture level, and, of course, taste vary? The authors recommend having a minimum
of four types of salt on hand as a general rule — a natural sea salt for general use, a
fine sea salt or iodized table salt for baking, a soft mineral salt for meat dishes, and a
fleur de sel or other fine salt for finishing dishes. By way of providing instructions for
a guided tasting, they suggest one prepare a range of foods (such as suggest tomato,
hard-boiled egg, melon, cucumber, grapefruit, rare beef, and chocolate) in order to
compare the effects that different salts have on flavour. I appreciated this breakdown of
things and had some fun comparing my workhorse natural sea salt and beloved delicate
Maldon flakes with newly-acquired Murray River pink salt and crunchy sel gris

The next section, entitled The Salt Kitchen,
introduces recipes as well as cooking, preserving, and curing techniques that
rely heavily on salt or are solely concerned with salt. A broccoli soup recipe teaches the
art of salting gradually whilst cooking. The authors suggest beginning with no salt and
call for its gradual addition accompanied by careful tasting along the way. The soup
blossoms from bland and tasteless to sparkling and complex as a result of the salt. Such
attention to detail and mindfulness is an important skill in the kitchen — if you are
salting well, you are probably cooking well.

On the fancier side of things there are lovely recipes for gravlax and herbes salées
(fresh herbs preserved in salt), and the powerful technique of pre-salting meat and game
is given considerable and worthy attention. Cooking with hot salt (packed in a pan, around
a piece of fish as a crust, or in the form of a hot block) is also detailed. Do we need to
cook scallops on a warmed Himalayan pink salt block? I’m not sure, but my gourmet spice
shop does sell these blocks, so I’ll probably give it a try at some point. I can say that
the recipe for Prawns Cooked in Rock Salt (which involves covering prawns with heated salt
in a cast iron pan) produced juicy, perfectly cooked prawns. As well, a miracle of taste
that results from the marriage of salty and sweet is explored via various dessert recipes
near the end of the section and I am happy to report that Murray River pink salt and
vanilla ice cream is indeed something for which we all should make time.

The section titled The Story of Salt is
concerned with exploring the social, historical, and scientific aspects of salt and does
so with lush photographs and intelligent prose. I have great respect for the fact that
Mark Kurlansky’s 2002 book, Salt: A World
History, is identified early on in the section as the definitive work on the
subject. The goal here is to add to the conversation.

I would have appreciated more information about the authors. We aren’t told much
about Gubler and Glynn beyond the fact that they collaborated on it and it was Gubler’s
idea. Some basic research told me that Gubler is trained as a chef, and this training is
apparent in both the quality of the recipes and the feel that the book has at certain
points. Like many chef-written cookbooks, there’s the odd moment where ideas appear
suddenly, are expressed, and then not explored further. Having worked in serious
restaurants as a first career, I’ve grown to love this tic — it’s reminiscent of the
controlled chaos, exploding creativity, and frenetic energy of restaurant kitchens and the
minds of engaged and passionate chefs. Just as Dr. William Carlos Williams’ poetry was
necessarily short, distilled, and efficient, making it imitative of the minutes he would
steal to write between seeing patients, so too are chef-written cookbooks often graced
with a tone imitative of their existence — creative, excited, fast-paced, to the point,
never overwrought. Execute the idea — on the plate or on the page — and move on.

The librarian that I now am loves the Resources section at the end. Here you will find a glossary, a good index, a
conversion chart for measurements, and a well-researched bibliography. The final pages of
the book are devoted to space for your own salt-based tasting notes. And it is with this space
for tasting notes that this love letter to salt does not end — it is simply turned over to the reader to continue.